


divided we fall

by NeverNooitNiet



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Brexit, Crack, Fluff, M/M, Politics, Smoking, The EDL, UKIP, look this is a fun fic i swear but that being said mentions of:, the murder of Jo Cox
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-26 09:31:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18280430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverNooitNiet/pseuds/NeverNooitNiet
Summary: In the interests of fairness— or more accurately put, in the interests of securing as many souls as possible— Hastur did, of course, pay some visits to the other side, the one who wanted things to stay the same. Well, he’d learned their name, now, because he kept encouraging his own group to curse it— Remain. And his group was Leave.This felt depressingly symbolic.The year is 2016. Ligur is still dead, Crowley is still a nervous wreck, and Hastur decides to try his hand at British politics, with some unexpected results.





	divided we fall

It was 2016. Ligur had been dead for twenty-six years, the world was still refusing to end, and Hastur, although he hated to admit it, was bored.

Demons, on the whole, aren’t very good with boredom; there’s a lot to be said about Hell, but it’s certainly never dull. There was always something going on, usually something involving screams and blood and general unpleasantness for everyone involved.

Hastur loved it. Well, as much as a demon could be said to love anything—in fact, _love_ was probably the wrong word altogether. Suffice to say, then, that Hastur took a certain sort of malicious enjoyment from Hell, and that this brought him as much twisted joy as his black scrap of a soul was capable of feeling.

Earth, however, Hastur was beginning to find, was about as interesting as watching pig shit congeal.

He’d been on a bit of a corrupting-priests kick, lately, pushing them into sin and lustfulness and all that, but it had quickly lost its spark. It was just too easy— they either needed no encouragement at all or embarrassingly little, and they all sinned in the same sorts of ways. It wasn’t proper craftsmanship anymore— it was far too simplistic for that. Very few things were, these days, and that, more than anything, was what Hastur longed for— a proper challenge to get into, someone properly holy it would make Heaven gnash their teeth to lose, the slow build-up of temptation and desire and finally the inevitable, teetering fall. There was, Hastur thought, something terribly beautiful about it all, about destruction.

But there were so few properly good few people left, these days. And that would have been all right with Hastur, no questions asked, as long as there had been plenty of bad people, in order to stir things up. But there weren’t many of those, either. Most of humanity had just become so painfully… average. You couldn’t do anything properly interesting with that sort of mediocrity, and Hastur was vastly irritated that he was expected to. He was a duke of Hell, after all. Not a bloody imp. He’d _eaten_ imps in the past.

Hastur was bored, bored, bored, and more than that, he was extremely overqualified for his job.

He should, by all rights, have been doing something far more interesting, preferably something not on Earth at all. And yet he was stuck here, with all these stupid, self-satisfied half-apes, and it was all Crowley’s fault, the bastard.

He’d murdered Ligur. With _holy water_. And then averted the apocalypse. And now… well.

Now Hastur glared through the grey damp of a rainy London day at the antique bookshop across the street from where he was lurking in an eminently sulky manner, or more specifically he glared at the two figures inside said bookshop. Now, Crowley was fucking an angel— more than that, Hastur thought, mind heavy with disgust, he looked very much as though he was _in love_ with an angel.

Hastur should have peeled Crowley’s skin off merely for giving the duke cause to _think_ such a thing. He desperately wanted to do just that. But after the world had failed to end in such a generally embarrassing manner, Hell had rather taken the view that it was going to ignore that the whole thing had ever been going to happen in the first place, and this included angrily ignoring the field agent who had so badly cocked things up for them. And so Crowley remained alive and untouched, and Ligur’s death remained unavenged, and Hastur, more often than not, remained outside that bloody angel’s bookshop, and watched them, because it was all he could do, all he was allowed to.

Crowley caught sight of him sometimes, he knew. Good. Give the bastard something to worry about.

Hastur knew that this wasn’t good demonic behaviour, that every moment he spent glowering in the rain as Crowley intertwined his fingers with the angel’s was a moment he could have been spending securing souls for his master. He also knew that his superiors could certainly give him a bollocking over this, if they wanted to; if you looked at it from a certain angle, his burning desire to give Crowley the punishment he deserved could be interpreted as Hastur being rather too upset about what had happened to Ligur, rather more attached to Ligur than a demon really ought to be, strictly speaking. Which was bollocks, of course. Hastur certainly didn’t miss Ligur, except in the most functional way, where he sometimes thought it might have been handy if the other duke had still been around. That was all.

He needed something to do. He needed a proper bit of evil to fill his thoughts with.

The problem, Hastur thought angrily, kicking a stray pound coin into the gutter as he stalked off through the rain, away from Crowley and the angel, who had just started kissing, was that he was just too blessed good at his job.

 

What was it that Ligur had been up to, right before he’d been killed? He’d been corrupting someone, that much was certain. And it had been a big job, too, something that had taken him several months. Hastur didn’t think about Ligur very often, because that was irrelevant to him now, obviously, because there was absolutely no reason to do so. But suddenly, Hastur dredged his mind back to a graveyard, and an owl, and his hands closed around the basket of a distinctly unsettling baby as he, Ligur and Crowley had recounted their deeds of the day.  

Crowley’s had been useless, of course, but then Crowley himself had been solidly useless for a good six thousand years. Hastur had talked about whatever priest it had been at the time. And Ligur… Hastur frowned. Now that he thought about it, he was fairly certain Ligur had said something about a politician.

Politicians. In Hastur’s mind, politicians were slimy, slippery fellows, pathetic, self-obsessed cowards who liked to talk quickly and were only interested in consolidating their own power.

When he thought about it like that, they reminded him a fair bit of Crowley.

Hastur’s frown slowly edged upwards into a somewhat malicious smile. Well, all right then. He thought he might try his hand at politics.

Hastur slunk away through the rain, and went to find himself a suitable politician whose life he could ruin. If he was very lucky, he might be able to pretend it was Crowley as he was doing it.

 

Hastur strode into the House of Commons with his usual loping, somewhat disjointed gait, and took stock of the 600-odd souls assembled in front of him. None of them so much as blinked at his sudden presence, but then people very rarely noticed Hastur, unless he wanted them to. The human brain, on the whole, just seemed to recognise that it would be healthier and happier if it skipped over the few feet of space that he was occupying. Of course, Hastur could make himself seen when he wanted to be seen, and he often left quite the impression, particularly when he got the maggots out. But he preferred this, often, the quiet discomfort of the human mind at his presence, the stain he left on them, like grease, or mould.

Hastur looked around. While there was certainly some of that tedious mediocrity, there were a few souls— more than a few— that positively reeked of evil, souls filled with jaded ambition and sly cunning and brazen, overwhelming self-interest. And every soul in the room, every single one, even the more average ones, tended towards Hell.

Here, Hastur thought, were some people he could work with.

They were older than he might have expected, in general, and while the expected suits and ties were there, they were perhaps a touch more shabby and ill-fitting than one— which was to say Crowley— might have liked. There was less of Crowley in them than one might like, in general. All the ingredients were there: that desperate twisting of words, the recycling of excuses, the general incompetence, the bone-deep exhaustion, but the whole they added up to was something quite different.

His revenge fantasies might not play out quite the way Hastur had been hoping. But oddly, he found that he didn’t mind. Because Hastur, quite unexpectedly, had begun to _listen_ to the politicians.

All the specifics of whatever it was that they were arguing about were going right over his head, of course. He didn’t care about those. He cared about the _feelings_ that were winding their way through the words. There was all the aforementioned self-interest and desire for power, of course, but there was something else there too. There was… fear. Of change. Of the future. And overriding that, there was a desperate desire for things to go back to the way they had been, to when they had made sense. The past was held up with a shining reverence in a way that made Hastur feel slightly uncomfortable, because that was, on occasion, what he did, longed for a time when the Plan had still been firmly in place and the world had been going to end and Ligur had still been there, grating against Hastur’s nerves in an oddly bearable way. And that was reflected back, a hundredfold, in the collection of men and women (mainly men) assembled in front of him. And woven through that, heady and thick, were the twin tastes of hatred and ignorance. Hastur considered himself a particular connoisseur of both.

There was a fair bit of monetary interest as well, of course. Root of all evil and that.

There was less of Crowley here than he might have thought. But there was far more of what one might call _old-grade evil_ , and maybe even a touch more of Hastur himself than the duke had expected.

He cracked his knuckles, and the politicians nearest to him winced, although the sound left no audible impression.

This, he thought, would be fun.

 

Crowley peered into the dark of the Soho streets outside Aziraphale’s bookshop with mild suspicion. Hastur wasn’t there. Hastur had not, in fact, been there for some time now. And while this was objectively a good thing, it… unsettled him, just a little.

Crowley hadn’t told Aziraphale about Hastur, and his penchant for lurking outside the bookshop. This was, he could occasionally admit to himself, because Crowley very desperately needed to believe that he’d gotten away with it, that in the wake of Almost-Armageddon, he and Aziraphale had somehow wrangled themselves a happy ending. Hastur, waiting in the dark that Aziraphale’s angelic eyes couldn’t penetrate, threatened this somewhat, and so Crowley’s silence had stemmed from a desperate need to ignore that that was happening, to buy into the fantasy of a stable life.

Crowley was very good at— well, not denying that things were happening, per se, but at pushing the thought of them safely to the dark outreaches of his mind. He didn’t think he could have survived for so long, otherwise. Something in him would have collapsed. This wasn’t to say that he wasn’t still petrified out of his mind— Crowley had been living in a state of complete and utter terror for a good six thousand years now. But it made the fear more manageable, somehow.

Besides, it had gotten to the point now where he thought abject terror rather suited him.

And it had all worked out so far, hadn’t it? It had been years, now, decades even, and nothing had happened. Hastur just… stood there. Glaring.

Only now he wasn’t.

This was good, Crowley thought, with forced cheeriness. This probably meant that Hastur had just had enough of him, that Hell had finally decided to cut ties, that the duke was off making someone else miserable, for once.

Or it meant that Downstairs was up to something, and that Crowley would quite probably be dragged screaming to see just what it was that they had planned for him.

Either way, he was entirely powerless to do anything about it. Crowley stared into the empty dark, and sighed, and then went to rejoin Aziraphale in the back room of the bookshop, where a bottle of wine was waiting for him.

 

Hastur was having the most fun he’d had in decades. He was also thinking about Crowley less than he had been for decades, and the correlation had not quite slipped his mind, although he was entirely too proud to address this in any way.

The politicians were fighting about something. Hastur by no means understood what it was, but there was one group who wanted things to change, and there was another who wanted things to stay the same. Hastur had chosen for the group who wanted things to change, because Hell was always supportive of any changes to the status quo, on principle, and because this group in particular was filled with that fervent desire for things to go back to how they had been, the selfish ache for the past that Hastur so bitterly understood.

Not that he felt any sort of kinship with these (or any) humans, of course. That was quite beneath him. But he thought that he could put that grudging understanding to good use, use it to pull at some of the hate that was particularly prevalent in this group, simmering just under the surface. And if Hastur could underhandedly nudge this group to victory— well, change was always a good source of panic, and panic an excellent source of selfishness, and so it would all snowball into a steady build-up of souls.

This wasn’t quite the steady, one-soul-at-time work Hastur was used to, but he was finding that in this group, that didn’t quite matter. He could flit round, person to person, and urge them to make bad decision after bad decision, indulging in all their petty vices, letting out any aggression or hatred. He was, of course, particularly supportive of any underhand or illegal activities that would help urge the campaign onwards, and their souls that teensy bit further into Hell. It was still craftsmanship, even if it wasn’t the one-at-a-time style that Hastur was used to; it felt almost as though the singular soul he was picking at was the soul of a nation.

Hastur’s little group of would-be revolutionaries was, technically, two little groups: the official one, and the unofficial one. Hastur enjoyed playing around with both, albeit for vastly different reasons. The official one was fun, because of all the little lines that could be crossed, the red tape that could be trampled or even torn down entirely. And the unofficial group proved to be equally entertaining, because, of course, there was none of that tape to get through in the first place: it was here that Hastur found he could produce the richest, most blatant hatred, bitter and thick, because he was finding, with remarkably little prodding, that these people really would just say _anything._

The sin that Hastur found him encouraging most of all, in both groups, was lying.

Lies were _excellent_ , because the lie itself was a sin, and because this sin then snowballed outwards, into a twin avalanche of blind hate and fear, and, driving the two, sweet, cloying ignorance.

And these politicians were excellent, excellent liars. Hastur spurred them on from the sidelines, of course, but he never ceased to be amused by both the inventiveness of the lies, and the determination with which they spread them. They were particularly fond of using some newfangled interweb thing to do this, which Hastur did not (and did not want to) understand in the slightest, but after they began doing so, the levels of evil skyrocketed, all around the country, a warm, steady thrum that reverberated comfortably through Hastur, to the extent that for the first time, Hastur could almost grasp Crowley’s more widespread approach to the job. Almost.

They did lots of things with this internet business. Lies and hate and fire. But now, crucially, the man who ran the official group— Hastur hadn’t learned his name, because it didn’t matter, all that did was his soul, and the stain he could leave on the souls of others— was planning on doing something with the internet, something big, something to help him win. Something that was not only morally wrong, as was more or less everything he did, but quite possibly, actually, illegal. And to politicians like this one, self-preservation was God.

The man teetered on a precipice. Hastur pushed him, and as ever, he fell.

The flood of corruption and tarnish that rusted over the souls of England after that made Hastur feel almost as giddy as he had during the fourteenth century.

All these lies and all this technology, oddly enough, seemed to culminate in something that Hastur could actually understand: a bus.

 

A bus. They were at Crowley’s flat, for once, curled up on the sofa, and a compromise of sorts had been reached, in that the sofa had retained its original white, aesthetically pleasing appearance, but had been largely smothered by a fairly abysmal tartan blanket, which appeared to have been hand-made by someone’s colourblind great-grandfather. Crowley was willing to put up with this, but only because the insulating softness of the blanket, alongside the warm, soft press of Aziraphale’s body against his, had lulled him into a very comfortable state of feeble, mock-grumbling acquiescence.

They were watching the news. And there was a bus, and the lie plastered on its side was so strong, so outrageous, that Crowley could practically taste it. It was almost as though…

The shape of a thought occurred to Crowley, quite suddenly, and he neatly slotted it away for later examination.

He turned, lazily, to face Aziraphale, delighting in the casual contact, the soft press of skin against skin, the still new and still so surprising easiness of it.

“Was the EU yours, or ours?” Crowley asked, in a tone that he hoped was the right amount of cool, vapid detachment. Aziraphale blinked, and considered this.

“You know,” the angel said slowly, “I haven’t the foggiest idea. If anything, they might have come up with that one themselves.”

Crowley nodded glumly, and pressed himself tighter against Aziraphale.

 

In the interests of fairness— or more accurately put, in the interests of securing as many souls as possible— Hastur did, of course, pay some visits to the other side, the one who wanted things to stay the same. Well, he’d learned their name, now, because he kept encouraging his own group to curse it— Remain. And his group was Leave.

This felt depressingly symbolic.

Only this time, Hastur thought grimly, his group, the rebels, the ones who wanted change— they were going to win. He didn’t know when this had started to matter, but somehow, it had. Somehow there were stakes now.

And so Hastur paid Remain lots and lots of visits. And he encouraged infighting and petty, foolish lies, and he looked at the currents of emotion that he’d swirling around the country in a perfect, violent arc, and decided that he didn’t want Remain to ruin them, and so he pushed them away from emotion all together, pushed them towards cold, sterile statistics, the sort of clinical, harsh logic that automatically causes polite disinterest, causes people to disengage.

And Hastur, for the first time, found himself listening to the people of England, the flood of souls he had always mocked and jeered at. And he felt their fear, and their insecurity, and their fervent desire for things to go back to how they had been, because surely things hadn’t always been _this_ bad, felt them reaching for someone to blame, and, quite without meaning to, he understood.

Not that he was doing anything as stupid and sentimental as feeling sympathetic for them. Or wishing that Ligur were here for this. Because he didn’t care. At all. Only, it might have been nice if there had been someone else who _listened_ in this way, someone who understood.

It was hardly as if he could go and talk to Crowley, after all. The great sodding pillock.

No, what Hastur did instead was to take these emotions he so bitterly understood and then twist them, heighten them, subtly push that blame in the right direction. He took their fear, and turned it into _anger_.

It was still about souls. Always, always about souls. But now, Hastur wanted— needed, almost— to win. Needed a satisfying end to the violent passion, the drive that coursed through him for the first time since Ligur’s death.

He still needed the world to end. But he supposed that could come later.

 

Hastur was learning, now, coming to terms with all the different groups that he eminently approved of, groups with complicated, acronymed names, things like UKIP and the EDL. These, he found, were full of wonderful, wonderful souls, black and rotting and _interesting_. This was proper, oozing hatred, and Hastur drank it like wine, swirled it and poured it out for the nation to share.

He pushed further. He started protests, and then turned them into riots. He incited fights, slurs, violence. And slowly, he began to pull the souls of England to his side, or rather sides: towards Hell, yes, but also towards Leave.

The deadline was looming close, now. Hastur didn’t quite know what he would do with himself when it was over. Find some new way to make Crowley miserable, perhaps. But the thought of that, of nights standing outside the angel’s shop, the clawing emptiness that raged through him… it didn’t feel nearly as satisfying as the sheer, beautiful purpose this campaign gave him. The certainty of having a mission.

He felt almost like he had Before, when there had still been a Plan in place, a world to end.

He would have been whatever the demonic equivalent of happy was, Hastur thought, if only Ligur had been there to see it happen as well.

But he could push these thoughts away, mostly, and focus on trying to win.

And then they did.

Not by much— in fact, they barely scraped it, which was what Hastur had wanted— the chaos and upheaval and sheer _panic_ this caused was so much nicer than the grim acceptance that a landslide would have caused. Now, the stench of shock permeated the country.

They had won. It was over. Hastur waited to feel something— pride, victory, the silencing of Ligur’s ghost in his head.

But all he felt was Empty.

 

They had won. Leave. Crowley had never gotten too involved with politics— oh, he had a list of politicians on his payroll at all times, of course, but then so did Aziraphale, and he knew full well that there was a fair bit of overlap between the two. But mainly he left them to fumble along on their own devices. Politicians, he’d found, were particularly adept at creating their own personal Hell, and then imposing it on the country as a whole.

Just look at Margaret bloody Thatcher, for one.

But this, Brexit… something about it felt different. It wasn’t the usual dry moaning of politicians and the resigned disinterest of the public as a whole— there was something more here. A current of emotion that wove its way through the millions and millions of souls that made up Great Britain.

Crowley closed his eyes, listened to it, and then had to try very hard not to pass out.

There was so much hate, mixed in with a crude, savage sort of joy. Crowley looked at the sort of people who felt this hate particularly strongly, and who the hate was directed at, and felt slightly sick. And then he had a look at the souls of the hated, choked with thick, overwhelming fear, and felt worse.

It was moments like this where he deeply, deeply regretted the fact that he lived in London, because the tight crush of people around him was just too much. Too intense. It wasn’t anywhere near the normal levels of negativity that always thrummed against the lines of Crowley’s being, and that, at this stage, he could normally tune out— it felt as though someone had turned up the volume, an invisible dial scraping against whatever it was that passed for Crowley’s soul.

This wasn’t normal human behaviour. And Crowley thought about the Duke of Hell who liked to stalk outside Aziraphale’s bookshop, and of his sudden, inexplicable absence in the last few weeks, and then, quite abruptly, Crowley made a mad dash for the bathroom, and started to retch.

He’d felt it worse than this, of course. He’d spent large portions of the twentieth century curled up, unable to move or even breathe under the assault of hundreds of thousands of souls, screaming and desperate. But the teeming currents of human emotion had been relatively stable for the last little while, nothing like this sudden surge, not since… not since a time he’d really rather not think about.

He spent most of the first day in bed, unable to stomach getting up, going outside, into that mess of humanity, even if it was only on the journey to Aziraphale’s bookshop.

After a while, he thought he had himself under control, more or less. And then the prime minister resigned, and was replaced by someone else, a woman called Theresa May, with a fashion sense bad enough to rival Aziraphale’s, and Crowley collapsed back against his small mountain of pillows with a groan as a fresh wave of panic skyrocketed around the country.

At some point, Aziraphale showed up, and Crowley did his best to ignore the faint waves of worry emanating off the angel as he buried himself in his arms, the soft warmth of him. He closed his eyes. He was vaguely aware of Aziraphale’s neat, careful fingers stroking through his hair, and then sleep took him.

By the time Crowley woke up— days or weeks later, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know— things seemed to have calmed down enough that he felt more or less functional again, albeit with a splitting headache. Aziraphale bundled him into some clothes— they might have been tartan to begin with, but quickly resolved themselves into something more palatable the second they came into contact they came into contact with the demon’s spindly frame— and they made their way over to the bookshop.

They got very drunk.

The next day, Crowley was staring idly out of the bookshop window, his glass of wine dangling just so from his hand in a way that he thought was eminently cool, when his eyes snagged on the all too familiar, lurking silhouette of a certain duke of Hell. Crowley took a deep breath, drained his glass, and stood up, somewhat shakily. Aziraphale stared up at him, mildly confused.

“My dear, what _are_ you doing?”

Crowley gave a stretched, somewhat manic grin and pulled a cigarette out of his pocket that had most definitely not been there ten seconds previously. Aziraphale furrowed his brow.

“You can smoke in here, you know. I don’t mind.”

Crowley gave a small, somewhat awkward wave of his hand.

“Nah, better not. Best to keep fire out of here, I think, after…” he broke off, blinked. This was true, and even if it was not, at this particular moment, the whole truth, it was still an admission he hadn’t meant to make. Aziraphale seemed to have picked up on this, as well, and concern flashed across the soft curves of his face.

“Should I come with you, then? It’s quite late.”

Crowley shook his head vigorously, then did his best to look suave and unbothered.

“ _No_ ,” he said, with slightly too much force. He cleared his throat and tried again. “No. ‘S fine, I’ll be quick, I just need some fresh air, that’s all…”

He leaned over to give Aziraphale, who still looked fairly befuddled (and slightly worried, but Crowley could sort that out later) a quick peck on the cheek, and then Crowley marched outside on legs that did not seem entirely pleased to be carrying his weight, and went to have a conversation with a duke of Hell.

Hastur, for his part, had been standing outside for some time now, and hating himself for it, and the sight of Crowley’s angular figure, hunched and tense, as he hurried his way over to where Hastur was waiting, caused a malicious gleam to spread through the wet dark of the duke’s eyes.

Crowley stopped abruptly, a few feet away from the other demon, and took a deep breath, fumbling to light his cigarette with numb fingers, and avoiding eye contact with Hastur. Or his best approximation of eye contact with the sunglasses on, anyway. The lighter finally, mercifully, ignited with a dull snap, and Crowley touched it to the end of his cigarette and inhaled with grateful reverence before speaking.

“I know it was you. This Brexit thing.”

Hastur’s grin was a sharp, pointed thing, chosen specifically to strike fear into his enemies. It was dreadfully effective, but it would do Crowley absolutely no good to let him know that.

“Just doing your job, Crawly,” Hastur said, drawing his voice out into a lazy sneer. “Seeing as you’re so busy, what with your fucking an angel, an’ all.”

Crowley took a deep, somewhat shaky breath. It had been inevitable that Hastur would bring up Aziraphale, he supposed, but it didn’t lessen the spike of terror that surged through him. He remained silent, and glared at Hastur in what he hoped was an appropriately threatening and reproachful manner.

It wasn’t. He looked a little bit like a lost puppy.

“Besides,” Hastur added after a while, “I would have thought you’d approve. I’m only copying your more widespread style, after all.”

Behind his sunglasses, Crowley blinked. Then, slowly, he shook his head.

“No,” he said slowly, and then with a tad more confidence: “ _no._ I’m not— this is different, Hastur. Worse. You can feel it.”

Hastur arched an eyebrow.

“Well yeah, it would be, wouldn’t it, if you had a _capable_ demon doing the work, instead of…” he looked Crowley up and down disdainfully, noting the sunglasses, the suit, still painfully expensive even in its current state of mild disarray, the glint of that ridiculous watch. “Instead of whatever it is _you_ think you are.”

Crowley took another deep, fortifying breath, and Hastur looked at him disdainfully, annoyed by the utter uselessness of it all.

“A woman is _dead_ , Hastur. That politician. Because of all this shit you’ve— all this _hate—_ it spreads, can’t you feel it? It spirals out of control.”

Hastur clapped him on the back, far too hard to be friendly.

“An’ that’s the point of it. And that’s been _your_ point, too, the excuse you’ve been using for centuries. They do it to themselves.”

Crowley let his cigarette fall to the ground, scuffed it out with his shoe, embers trailing behind, suddenly disgusted by the cloying smell of the smoke.

“Why are you doing all of this, Hastur? Why are you _here_?”

He turned to face the other demon properly, peering over the edge of his sunglasses. A dim voice in the back of his head was yelling that this was a terrible idea, that Hastur could end his miserable existence very, very easily, but Crowley was far too tired to listen to it. He took a step closer.

“What do you want from me?”

A terrible fire ignited in the dark pits of Hastur’s eyes, reminded Crowley of just how far down in the pecking order he was in comparison to the duke.

“What do I _want_?” Hastur hissed. “What do I want? I want Ligur back. I want the world to end, like it was fucking supposed to, and preferably I want you in huge amounts of pain while all this is happening. _I want things to go back to the way they used to be_.” He drew his face up close to Crowley’s. “Can you rustle all that up for me, do you reckon?”

Crowley gulped, and Hastur let his lips curl upwards in a distorted impression of a smile.

“Didn’t think so,” he said, and turned away again. Crowley fiddled awkwardly with his sunglasses, needing something to do with his hands and slightly regretting the loss of his cigarette.

“I’m— I’m sorry about Ligur,” he said finally, haltingly. “Really I am. I know what he was to you. But the two of you would have… I didn’t have a _choice_ ,” Crowley finished, hating the pleading, almost grovelling tone that had crept into his voice.

Hastur reflected on this for a moment, and then scoffed.

“You,” he said, “don’t know _shit_.”

Crowley, in a rare flash of genius, decided that this might be a good time to keep his mouth safely shut.

Hastur let out a frustrated sigh, a quick, angry thing. It was the first time he had drawn breath in a good few centuries.

“Why do you get to win?” he asked. “Why do you get your angel, and your world, and— and everything, while I don’t even get to go back to Hell? When you’ve done fuck-all for fucking millennia, and I’ve done everything they’ve ever asked of me, and—”

Hastur broke off, let out a tired, humourless laugh, and closed his eyes for a moment.

“You could,” Crowley ventured carefully, “just _stop_ , you know. Leave them be. Like you said, they do plenty by themselves.”

Hastur looked at Crowley as though he’d just sprouted a halo.

“You might have forgotten what you are, but I’m a _demon_. It’s what we do. What we have to.”

Crowley looked down at the crumpled remains of his cigarette, far below. He kicked it into the gutter.

“I don’t think we do, really,” he said, somewhat distantly, and Hastur snorted. It was still a harsh, ugly sound, but at least it sounded vaguely like a sound the duke ought to be making.

“Your angel’s rubbing off on you,” Hastur said. He didn’t sound angry anymore. A bit lonely, if anything, and somehow that was worse.

“No,” said Crowley after a little while, “I don’t think he is.”

Hastur raised an eyebrow.

“So you’re just naturally this shit of a demon, then?”

“I think,” Crowley said slowly, “it’s _them_.”

He didn’t specify who he was talking about. He didn’t have to. Hastur looked vaguely as though he was about to say something cutting, and so Crowley pushed onwards.

“They’re rubbing off on you as well, you know.”

Hastur let out a real, proper laugh this time. Crowley just shrugged.

“I mean. I killed Ligur, and we’re just… talking. Twenty-odd years ago, you would have killed me straight away, no questions asked.”

“I’m still considering it,” Hastur said darkly, and Crowley somehow found it in him to grin.

They were quiet for a moment, and Crowley found, to his surprise, that some of the tension had eased out of the tight set of his shoulders.

“I just— why, though? Why leaving the EU, of all things?”

Hastur gave him a squinty, sideways sort of glance.

“The what?”

Crowley stared.

“The EU. The European Union. The thing that this country’s going to leave, because of your direct interference? What this whole referendum business was about?”

His voice had gotten progressively shriller as he went on. Hastur just shrugged.

“No fucking clue. It wasn’t about that. It was about…”

“Souls?” Crowley suggested, with remarkably little enthusiasm. Hastur shook his head.

“Nah. The… change. And the going back, I guess, and…” he shrugged again. “I dunno. They were fun to mess around with. Old-grade evil, you know.”

The pair of them faded into silence again. Crowley shook his head. He felt suddenly, incredibly tired.

“Uh. Well. The thing is,” Crowley started slowly, “I’ve sort of been talking over things with Aziraphale, and… I think we might move out of London for a bit. To the South Downs, I think the plan is.”

Hastur mulled this bit of information over for a few moments, then decided he was flatly uninterested in it.

“And?”

Crowley worried at his fingers, that tight, crackling energy making a sudden comeback.

“And I was sort of wondering if you would stop… doing this. Not this as in the talking,” he added hurriedly. “I probably couldn’t stop you anyway— well, I know I can’t— and besides, this has been unexpectedly… well, I’m not dead, so… yeah. But the lurking. It would be good if you could sort of put a stop to that.”

“You killed Ligur,” Hastur said flatly. “I’d say that gives me the right to lurk all I fucking want.”

“Ah,” said Crowley, squirming. “Right.”

“But,” Hastur said, throwing the word out suddenly, sharply, like a bullet, “if you’re off in the middle of nowhere with your angel…” he sighed. “I suppose I might be too busy over here to do very much lurking.”

In the dark safety behind his sunglasses, Crowley narrowed his eyes.

“Too busy doing what, exactly?” he asked, with no small amount of suspicion. Hastur curved his face into a remarkable pantomime of innocence, considering.

“They haven’t actually done the thing yet, have they? Just said that they will. So I’ll be here, to make sure they all fight and panic about it, and to drag it out, and… yeah.” Hastur’s face twisted into an almost blissful smile at the thought, and Crowley shuddered slightly. Maybe the South Downs wasn’t far away enough. He cleared his throat awkwardly.

“Do you really have to— you know—”

“Yes,” said Hastur, and if a word could feel as though it had maggots crawling all over it, then this one definitely did. Crowley nodded again, somewhat dejectedly. It would be slightly better in the South Downs, probably— less people around. But it would only be better for him, specifically. Everyone else, all this panic, would still be here, soaking into the landscape.

Crowley sighed.

“Can you at least make sure no-one else gets killed? Please?”

Hastur considered this for a moment, furrowing his brow in a distinctly unpleasant fashion. But eventually, he nodded.

“No more politicians,” he said. “They’re all going Downstairs anyway, and I want to see how far I can push ‘em… they’re far more fun alive, anyway.”

“Ah,” said Crowley, somewhat faintly. “Right.”

They fell quiet again, and there was a scheming sort of smile on Hastur’s face that Crowley really did not like the look of. Perhaps they should move sooner rather than later.

A rectangle of light cut through the dark, filled by the small, pudgy figure of an angel peering out worriedly to make sure his demon was all right. Crowley gave a lopsided smile and waved awkwardly to show Aziraphale that he was fine, and then he turned back to Hastur.

“Er,” he said. “Well. Bye, then, I suppose. Have… fun with your politicians,” he got out with some difficulty. Hastur grinned a remarkably pointy grin.

“Have fun fucking your angel,” he said, and Crowley supposed that was as close to a truce as the two of them would ever come.

Crowley walked slowly back to the warmth, to Aziraphale. Hastur waited until the door to the bookshop had been firmly closed, before turning away to slink back to Westminster.

He had work to do, after all.

 

Inside the bookshop, Aziraphale put the kettle on to boil and gave Crowley a Look, dark brows furrowed in a way that desperately made Crowley want to kiss them smooth again.

“What was all that about?” Aziraphale asked, not-so-subtly looking Crowley up and down, as if to check that he was still in once piece.

“Politics,” Crowley said vaguely, which he reckoned was true enough, in more than one sense of the word.

Aziraphale nodded slowly, a small frown still playing round the corners of his mouth.

“But it’s… you’re not being recalled Downstairs or anything, are you?” Both of their superiors had been remarkably quiet since the botched apocalypse, which was just how they liked it. Still, it was— unsettling, to put it mildly.

Crowley walked over so that he was standing directly behind Aziraphale, and draped his arms languidly around the angel’s shoulders. He found, much to his delight, that standing like this, Aziraphale’s head was just the right height for him to rest his chin on, and so he did, inhaling the soft scent of him. Crowley nuzzled into Aziraphale’s dark curls before leaning forward to give the angel a quick kiss on the forehead.

“I’m staying right here,” he said.

Somewhere in the background, the kettle started to boil.

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> see SOME of us can get things finished for the 29th, thanks so much for reading xx


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